EclipseCon 2008 Wrapup: It's all about Collaboration

What hit me today as I was biking into work after 4 days at EclipseCon was the collaboration undercurrent running throughout the conference.

Our goal in Jazz is to have a platform designed to be team first and allow smooth and seamless collaboration with your team members and with your artifacts. What does it mean to collaborate with your artifacts? For me this means I can have something like a build result communicate all about itself:

• who contributed
• why they contributed
• when they contributed
• what they contributed

As well, the build result allows me to exactly reconstitute the state that existed for exploration of any issue. Same goes for the Jazz process enactment. We have to make it easy for the user to explore and understand, to collaborate, with the team process. The team advisor is one of mechanisms for this communication of process.

And it is not just about collaborating with your fellow team mates or work artifacts. It is also about collaborating with your clients and customers. The Eclipse work for p2 and e4 proves this point.

From Pascal Rapicault's talk p2 will make it easier for consumers to discover and install. p2 will make it easier for developers to share their work.

e4 will help to extend Eclipse into new domains beyond the IDE space. People who never have used an IDE and will never use an IDE. These same people understand the web interface. Reuse of our code for a web client just makes sense. We can provide a web client experience, whether it be the same or different experience from a desktop client without duplication of all the effort. The required tooling to achieve this nirvana will be a great addition to the Eclipse tool set. And just the process of creating e4 will necessitate Eclipse and the Eclipse process embracing collaboration at a new level.

Easing collaboration also helps to enable what I am calling mercenary programming. John Wiegand's glimpse into the future was validated via Sam Ramji's announcement of Microsoft supporting / sponsoring Eclipse development but with no interest of having its own committers. To me this means paying committers to wade in and tackle your problems. Short lived and dynamic teams composed of globally distributed members. This just screams for the need of tools like Jazz and beyond. Kevin McGuire and Tim Wagner mentioned the evolution of a team as a driver for trends in UI design and interaction as well.
Also from Sam's talk on Wednesday, we "offend any type of developer at your own peril". If you make it hard for people to collaborate with you, this would seem to be some type of insult don't you think?

Cory Doctorow continued the theme where a key point of his presentation was how we have extended and improved the capabilities of the individual. We have become superhuman as a result of pervasive collaboration and availability of information. Cory also proposed that the ease of collaboration within a company will decide its success. Collaboration cost is no longer a factor with it being a close approximation of zero. This was echoed by the ECF talk where Scott Lewis stated that we need collaboration to work on a system that is outside of the understanding of one person. I think that describes most systems we all work on. The tools just need to keep improving the support for this free interaction and productivity boost.

Finally, I don't think the strong desire for people to come to conferences such as EclipseCon indicates a deficiency of our tools to allow us to collaborate. The tools and the work enable the day to day interactions but I hope we will always crave the face to face :-)
I know I look forward to next year.

EclipseCon Exercise Day 4: Phew...all done

The final day of the conference and we had 15 people roll out of bed. We had 7 or 8 people who ran every morning of the 4 days of the conference. We even had 1 new person on the last day.

I think for many it was the first EclipseCon where they did some exercise to counter things like the perennial chocolate fountain, open bars, and all you can eat everything!


We did get a little more adventuresome today with many doing a short loop out into the wetland sanctuary getting off the paved trail. Some others had the success of running for the full time out on the trail...not that there is anything wrong with walking. Congrats to all!

We never got to doing stair repeats for our cool down. We always ended with taking the easy route by filling up the elevator with all kinds of smelly runners :-)


It was great to see all the runners coming out at different paces and abilities and just having fun while meeting new people. I hope to do this event next year and see even more of you out for the fun. We know the chocolate fountain will be back!

EclipseCon Jazz Recording Sessions

Yesterday was IBM Developer Day at EclipseCon and the Jazz team "roving" reporters are checking in on the Jazz Team blog with the highlights of the Jazz talk presentations from the afternoon sessions.

The Jazz team blog is here: link.
My roving report from Erich's talk is here: link.

EclipseCon Exercise Day 3: Holding Strong

Another beautiful morning in Santa Clara with 16 hardy souls crawling out of bed early to start the day off right. And Dave S was laying down on purpose in the photo...no injuries incurred on the run :-) Some of the runners have been out every morning so far and I believe are planning to make every day!

We "accidentally" ran a little further this morning with the front runners really going the distance and possibly cutting some new trail? :-) We did a short jaunt on a dirt road out into the wetland park to catch a glimpse of San Francisco bay.

Everyone did make it back with a smile on their face and happy to receive the water and towel from the Hyatt door man. As well, I finally remembered to bring down some running goodies: Montrail water bottles, some Nuun samples and Gleukos drink mix. If you were on the run and you liked the stuff fire those companies an email so we can get more running swag for next year. And I know Donald will be working on a corporate sponsor for next year... :-)

I had also proposed a noon run but that seems to be a time when people are just too busy networking or eating. I know for next year.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, so if you have waiting to join us Thursday morning is your chance!

Now off to the highly anticipated Microsoft talk...who will be the secret guest?